Sam Riley on Islands, a Sun-Kissed Noir About the Lies We Tell Ourselves

Sam Riley was at home in Berlin pondering his next move when a script came through his door. It was intended for the eyes of Robert Pattinson and Michael Fassbender, but as luck would have it the director, Jan-Ole Gerster, shared the same agent as Riley, who decided on the spot he would steal it from under their noses. (It helps that he comes cheaper than the other two actors, he notes dryly.)

A shrewd existential drama cosplaying as a noir, Islands tells the story of a burnt-out tennis coach, Tom, working at a hotel in Fuerteventura. Tom had been set to turn pro before his career was cut short by injury; now, he drifts through sessions with the hotel’s guests in between drunken encounters at the local nightclub, which always seems to be playing the same song. But when a mysterious young mum, Anne (Stacy Martin), turns up one day seeking sessions for her son, she awakens something in Tom that shakes him out of his routine.

What is it that drew Riley to the role? A sense, perhaps, that somewhere in this story lay one that was close to his own. “I knew I could play a washed-up 40-something who never fully reached his potential,” says the Yorkshire-born star. “I mean, I make a joke out of it, but that part I can really relate to. I don’t drink any more. But I can fully understand that cycle of denial and self-destruction, of not wanting to face [the fact that you’re] lying to yourself and all of that stuff.”

Riley, of course, got his big break in Control, Anton Corbijn’s 2007 biopic about Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. When shooting wrapped on the film, he went out to Berlin to visit his co-star, Alexandra Maria Lara, and never came back. Until then he’d been living the indie-sleaze dream in Leeds, where his band, 10,000 Things, had been tipped for big things before promptly imploding. Feeling adrift, he responded to an open call for the lead in Corbijn’s film, and wound up snaring the part that would give him his career, his family and a new life in Germany. That was 18 years ago now, and there have been memorable roles since – in Brighton Rock, Maleficent, and a bevy of projects with maverick British filmmaker Ben Wheatley, to name just a few. But Riley finds a new register here, all knotted regret and unexpected moments of tenderness, that marks an exciting new chapter in his career.

The actor says he turned up in full tennis garb to his first meeting with Gerster, who challenged him to a match to make sure he could convincingly inhabit the role, a prospect that terrified him. When he got the part, he worked on his game with a coach called Yaroslav, who was “very much of the eastern European way of not, like, nurturing a whole lot. After some weeks if I got it over the net and it looked pretty good, he’d just go, ‘clean’. That was the most I ever got from him.”

By contrast, Riley was comfortable performing his lines in Spanish, his roles in several German-language productions having steeled him for the challenges of performing in another tongue. (Riley says he only got serious about his own German studies when he nearly lopped his toe off in an accident, and was unable to communicate the fact to his neighbour.) “In some ways I feel more like a foreigner in the UK now, although I’m not sure when that happened,” he reflects. “I remember getting my [residency] at the Rathaus Schöneberg, which is the city hall where Kennedy said, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ When the woman behind the desk gave me the stamp I did the line as a joke and she was like, ‘Yeah, a rucksack Berliner.’” He mimes a dagger being plunged through his chest.

Tom, too, is an outsider to the world he inhabits. His charming, slightly raffish air can’t quite mask the look of a man who is stunned to find that life has led him here, to this hot desert rock in the Atlantic. There’s a sense that he’s living his own personal Groundhog Day, an analogy the teetotal Riley seizes on: “See, addiction is a bit like that. You wake up and think, ‘Will today be the day when I don’t have a drink?’ And then when it isn’t there’s the remorse, the regret, and that’s the vicious cycle, because the only way to stop that feeling of disaster is to have a drink.”

And then suddenly, when Anne enters the picture, he does stop drinking. Anne has problems of her own, trapped in an unhappy marriage with the supercilious Dave (Jack Farthing), who is pining for a misspent youth free from commitment. Tom is drawn into their family dysfunction for reasons he can’t quite fathom, bonding with their son, Anton, before Dave’s disappearance after a night on the lash puts Anne in the frame for suspected murder and leads, in turn, to a bombshell discovery of his own. What will he do? The question haunts the rest of the picture up to the very last frame.

“You know, there are opportunities that present themselves, and sometimes if you take them your life completely changes,” says Riley, musing on the film’s theme of the paths we take in life, those we don’t, and the “horrible, wailing emptiness” (in Dave’s choice turn of phrase) that can creep up on us when we stop paying attention. “When I was starting out there were a lot of conversations about whether I could ever do better than Control, but I wasn’t at all worried about that. I was just happy to have a new career. But if I hadn’t got that part? I could have ended up being a singer at a resort in Fuerteventura, drinking myself into oblivion.”

Islands is out in UK cinemas now.